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9781835537268
OPEN ACCESS
Mere Bagatelles: Women’s Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810
Published on08 October 2024256 pagesISBN:9781835537268 (Paperback) |eISBN:9781835537800 (PDF) |eISBN:9781835537275 (ePub)
https://doi.org/10.3828/9781835537268Ebook available to libraries as part of Irish Studies Online
Honorable Mention in the ACIS Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, 2024
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.
Engaging with previously overlooked diaries by women in Ireland, written between 1760 and 1810, this book opens new avenues concerning authorship and female agency, transforming our understanding of women’s contributions to both literature and culture. The result of extensive archival research across multiple international archives, this book presents an entirely new corpus that demonstrates the creativity and literary capabilities of women in this period.
The surviving diaries showcase these women’s engagement with a form that allowed them to explore their subjectivity and to experiment with the presentation of self. This book demonstrates how these ‘bagatelles’ should be treated as literary works that were shaped by, and in turn influenced, wider cultures of reading and writing, underlining the generic fluidity at play. The diary form forces a dismantling of the neat binaries of public and private, of imaginative and non-imaginative prose writing, complicating our understandings of each. The content of these diaries prompts a re-evaluation of the very contours of Irish writing and what we consider as literature, while allowing us to rediscover the importance of manuscripts to our explorations of literary culture.
Amy Prendergast is Assistant Professor in Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
‘This fascinating study makes an important contribution to scholarly
understanding of women’s diaries and Irish women’s literary history in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is meticulously
researched and the extensive archival material is sensitively and
skilfully interpreted to provide rare insights regarding
women’s lives and writing. This engaging book also has wider significance
for studies of female authorship and agency, manuscript culture and uses
of the diary form, as part of a wider conversation regarding life writing
in the period.’
'Mere Bagatelles is an excellent piece of scholarship, an absorbing read and a significant addition to early modern Irish women’s studies. The voices of the women themselves are given primacy; the text brims with their feelings and experiences: some humorous, many devastating.'
Angela Byrne, Women's History Association of Ireland
Table of Contents
| Introduction |
| 1. The Diarist as Author: Literary Aspirations, Audiences, and Legacies |
| 2. Diaries, the Novel, and the Adolescent Self |
| 3. Vulnerability and Abuse: Women’s Diary Writing as Testimony |
| 4. ‘A means of my doing better’: Diary Writing as a Tool for Individual Improvement |
| 5. Creating and Curating the Diary Environment: Place and Identity |
| Afterword |